Story

Drupal is a powerful content management framework. Having long outgrown its community origins, it now provides a flexible basis for all kinds of sites, ranging from online magazines to complete social networks. One feature that has long been in Drupal is its multi-site support, that is, one Drupal software installation can support multiple web sites. Its multi-site support makes Drupal a perfect basis for environments where more than one related site has to be configured. Examples are internet service providers, SEO site farms, landing pages for individual products or marketing microsites.

Each site in a multi-site installation shares the Drupal core and common modules or themes. It can have its own modules and themes, though. Each site can peruse a single database, or have its own separate database. Drupal 7 has added to this by finally providing full support for SQlite, a complete relational database that resides in a single file and needs no database server.

On this site, we provide the autosite module that allows Drupal end users (with the correct permission) to create their own Drupal sites. In the standard configuration, these Drupal sites use SQlite as their database. This way, autosite-created Drupal sites are completely self-contained and can be completely backed up as a simple file-based archive and re-created elsewhere by simply unpacking this archive.

The autosite module does not strive to replace the full-featured Aegir system for setting up a full multi-server hosting business. Neither does it attempt to create a competitor to SaaS providers like drupalgardens or buzzr. Rather, it provides a minimal approach to setting up and self-hosting many Drupal sites. Users may be SEO agencies, intranets, or mom and pop web consulancies.